Note: I have moved to MIT

Last updated: 9/96

Erik Rauch



I'm currently a graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Stanford. I graduated in May 1996 from Yale, majoring in Computer Science and Math. You can see my other home page here, with some fun and interesting links.

My vita in hypertext or postscript.

Some Research Interests

Nonlinear dynamics and fractals

At Yale, I did my undergraduate thesis work with Benoit Mandelbrot, on the fractal properties of the Ising model at the critical state. I'm also investigating lacunarity, a measure of the "texture" of a fractal. I continued last summer as a visitor at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.



Multi-agent systems

I'm intrigued by collective intelligence and the possibilities of achieving intelligent behavior in a distributed way. A great metaphor for this, or inspiration if you like, is the social insects. An ant colony gracefully shifts resources around, and responds to its environment in a coordinated way, without any sort of central organization. There is no one ant that gives the orders, and each one can sense only its immediate environment; but a swarm of them exhibits global cooperative behavior, and the species has been incredibly successful. Maybe this very lack of central command is a source of strength, and in some sense the functionality of the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

At the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute, I worked on a project started by physicist Mark Millonas and Dante Chialvo to better understand this kind of mass action by creating a model containing what we believe to be the minimum components necessary for swarm dynamics and analyzing it. Our conclusions are about the functionality of the swarm. In particular, it has the ability not only to form stable patterns of traffic, but to shift them in response to a small outside stimulus. We found that the swarm has this "information-magnifying" ability when its behavior is just below a second-order phase transition separating ordered from disordered behavior. If you're interested, I am the first author of a paper in Physics Letters A that you can read in hypertext format or postscript (with figures).

(If you want to hear more, and happen to be going to the March conference of the American Physical Society, I'll be giving a talk on it.)

Evolutionary computation

I've also worked on genetic algorithms. In 1993 I wrote MPGA, a parallel GA in C++ and Linda, as part of a computational biology project. The GA is being used to optimize 60 floating-point variables in simulating a mathematical model of the development of the fruit-fly embryo.


Related links

  • Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems
  • ICMAS96 Workshop on Animal Societies
  • Physics of Computation '96
  • Adaptation, Co-evolution and Learning in Multiagent Systems
  • From Animals to Animats: The Fourth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior
  • Dynamical Systems and Learning at Brown
  • Information Mechanics Group (Physics of Computation) at MIT
  • American Physical Society March Meeting
  • Fifth Annual Conference on Evolutionary Programming
  • Xerox Dynamics of Computation group
  • Neural Nets and adaptive comp. at LANL
  • ALife Bibliography
  • Computational Ecology at Yale

    Local resources

    [Stanford] [CS Dept.] [Students]